Adrift away...

Want to know where your message in a bottle will turn up or track down the path of local floating pollution? Welcome to adrift, a website inspired by research into ocean circulation by Dr Erik Van Sebille and the delightful book Moby Duck about the true adventure of 28,800 rubber ducks lost at sea.

Here you can explore how all kinds of objects drift through the ocean - from rubber duckies to plastic pollution - and where each object might end up if it is washed out to sea from your beach.

How do we know?

The scientific methods used to calculate the paths of floating debris through our oceans for 10 years after release are quite complicated. It is perhaps best summarised in the video below

Our oceans make up 70 per cent of the Earth's surface and are in constant motion. Driven by the sun and the wind our oceans develop mighty currents and eddies, some of which can take centuries to loop through all of our planet's ocean basins.

These currents also move through three dimensions. Many rise from the deep ocean near coastlines while other currents descend to the deepest parts of the ocean. These vertically descending currents are often, but not always, in the middle of the ocean in regions known as the five great gyres. These gyres are giant vortices spanning the whole ocean basin where water at the surface slowly spirals inwards until it sinks.

However, almost all plastic materials and lighter than water objects (such as those messages in a bottles) stay on the surface.

Since the late 1970s, ocean scientists have tracked drifting buoys but it wasn't until 1982 the World Climate Research Programme put forward the idea of a standardised global array of drifting buoys. These buoys float with the currents just like plastics except - like Twitter from the sea - they send a short message to scientists every six hours about where they are and the conditions in that location.

With this information, we have been able to create a statistical model of the surface pathways of our oceans. The Adrift website uses this model and generates an animation of the likely path and destination of floating debris over a ten year period into the future.

Fortunately, there are many groups of people that want to do something about this problem. They for instance clean up beaches, or try to reduce the amount of plastics we use in our daily lives. So, if you want to help out yourself, why not contact one of the organisations below?

If you want to know more about plastics in the ocean, go to our website plastinography.org.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: How does the pathway of marine plastics shown on this site relate to the plume of the radioactive material from the Fukushima disaster?

A: The drifting buoys used as input for this website track the currents in the upper ocean. This site can therefore be used to study the pathways of the debris from the Fukushima tsunami itself. The plume of radioactive material, however, will not only stay at the surface. As we showed in a scientific study (see also here), much of the material will actually move to greater depths. Nevertheless, the fastest pathways of radioactive material will be near the surface, where current speeds are greatest, and so the animation of the Fukushima fallout shows the route of that part of the radioactive material that reaches the US coast first.

Q: Why does the site say "Sorry, we have no data for that ocean area"?

A: The website is built using data from observations only. And like any observations, these are not perfect. We just do not have data from every area in the ocean. This can be seen in the map below, which shows in red the areas where there are not enough surface drifting buoys for our analysis.

Most areas without sufficient coverage are very near the coastlines. But there are also extensive regions in the Arctic, around Antarctica, in the Indonesian Archipelago, the North Sea and some other marginal seas. The reasons for this poor coverage vary from sea ice to piracy, as can be read in this excellent article (paywalled).

Q: Why does my plastic litter stay in the Mediterranean Sea?

A: Again, this is a coverage issue, see also the map above. In the whole 30 years of the drifter project, there has never been a drifting buoy that crossed the Gibraltar Strait. In our transition matrix, the Mediterranean Ocean is therefore completely disconnected from the rest of the global ocean.

Q: What exactly does the scale mean?

A: The scale on the bottom right runs from 0% to 1%. This may sound like a small number, but that is just because the plastic very quickly spreads over a large area. We have max-ed out areas where the plastic concentration is higher than 1%, in order to focus on the spread of the plastic after a few years.

Q: Why can I see only plastic litter for the coming 10 years?

A: The 10 years maximum is a trade-off between more information and faster response times. In principle, we can advect the plastic much longer than 10 years, but it will then take much longer before you see the result. If you really want to see plastic evolution on longer time scales, contact us directly.

Q: Can I export the raw data from the experiment? / Can I have multiple release points?

Team members

Dr Erik van Sebille is a physical oceanographer at the University of New South Wales, who studies the large-scale circulation of the ocean. He is particularly interested in the connection between ocean basins and the processes that determine how much water 'leaks' from one ocean basin into another. These connections are important for global climate and for the pathways of both marine organisms and debris. For more information, see www.erik.vansebille.com.

David Fuchs is a solutions architect with more than thirteen years of experience in software ranging from voice over IP to applications of machine learning techniques to large data sets. David brings combined experience in both engineering and science and is currently interested in software applications to large amount of data in general and climate data in particular.

Life Matters on ABC Radio National covered Adrift.org.au on their June 24 show. Listen to it here.

Download the data

You can download the data of the experiment on the screen via the link below.

First click on a point on the map

The data is a comma-separated file that should load into Excel. It has five columns: the year, the month, the latitude, the longitude and the weight. Each row in the file corresponds to one grid point on the map, and rows with the same year and month data are shown as one snapshot in the animation. The sum of weights for a given year and month is always 1, except for that grid cells where the weight is smaller than 0.00025 are not listed.